In the preparation of food products, for example soups, it is common to store various ingredients of the final product at different locations in a plant and to bring these ingredients in appropriate amounts from their storage places to blending stations where they are assembled in appropriate kettles, in accordance with predetermined recipes.
As an example only, the main solid ingredients, the spices, the condiments and the preservatives may be stored at different locations in a plant, remote from the blending kettles; in a plant utilized in the production of mushroom soup and chicken soup, as an example, mushrooms and diced chicken may be stored at different dispensing stations in a bulk solid-ingredient storage area, condiments may be stored in a condiment-storage room, appropriate spices may be stored in a spice storage room, and preservatives such as sodium glutamate may be stored in a preservative storage room in the same plant.
Also, typically there may be a plurality of different blending kettles in the plant, each to be used in preparing a particular batch of a particular soup or other food products. In general, in such examples what is ordinarily desired is to transport the right kinds and amounts of ingredients--i.e. bulk ingredients, condiments, preservatives and spices, etc. to a particular one of the blending kettles at a blending station, in accordance with the corresponding recipe, and to reduce the risk that the wrong ingredients may reach any of the kettles.
According to one procedure used previously for accomplishing such assembly of ingredients, transport containers in the form of large drums on wheeled carriers are provided, and one or more employees wheel the transport containers to the appropriate ingredient-storage stations to fetch the desired ingredients, as determined by a list which each involved employee carries with him. Thus if an employee is provided with a list requesting chicken soup, he may wheel the transport container to the bulk solid-ingredient storage area, weigh the amount of diced chicken indicated by his list into the transport container, and then wheel the container to the blending station. Another transport container is wheeled to the preservative room, the appropriate amount of preservative placed in the container, and the container then wheeled to the blending kettle. Typically, the appropriate relatively small amounts of preservatives and of spice are delivered to the blending kettle in what is commonly called a spice cart, by wheeling the spice cart to the spice room, putting into it trays containing the amounts and type of spice indicated by the recipe list, and then wheeling the spice cart to the blending kettle. Another employee serving as a checker is stationed at the blending kettle to check that the desired kinds and amounts of ingredients have been assembled at the kettle for the recipe to be made up in that kettle. All of the assembled ingredients are dumped at appropriate times into the kettle for blending, and usually for heating, to make the desired soup.
Some of the difficulties of such systems are that they are expensive in requiring a checker to check carefully the assembled ingredients, and they are subject to error, to a degree, depending upon how careful or how negligent the fetching employee and the checker may be. One significant type of error which may arise in the latter type of operation is that a transport container may be taken to the wrong blending kettle and its contents dumped into that wrong kettle to produce a non-standard batch of blended product.
It is an object of the present invention to provide new and useful apparatus and method which will mitigate the costs and reduce the errors occurring in the above-described prior-art method and system.
A further object is to increase the certainty of the delivery of the proper ingredients, in the proper proportions, to the proper assembling or blending station.